


roads that are endless, and rooms that are huge

by haloud



Category: Project Octopath Traveler (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 14:29:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15269481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haloud/pseuds/haloud
Summary: Eight journeys started, eight homes left behind, eight bodies on the battlefield, eight goals on the horizon.  A series of vignettes written prior to the game's release.





	roads that are endless, and rooms that are huge

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from "measure the globe" by astronautalis

Hundreds of years fuel the tradition of this pilgrimage, and yet no record exists written by a pilgrim’s own hand.  If she had any word, any light to guide her way, maybe Ophilia wouldn’t be so lost.

They treat her with such reverence, and she uses them.  Because her hands tremble on the lantern; because her tongue stops her throat when she has to haggle with a shopkeeper; because night is long and dark and the loneliness frightens her worse than monsters or men.  They call her _saint_ and lay down their cloaks to keep her shoes from the dirt of the road. Yet, it’s with Primrose and Therion she feels safest.  Not everyone has a Lianna.  Not everyone was given a warm chapel as a home and calming words to give them purpose.  It’s with Primrose and Therion she feels with an anxious yearning the ghost of the girl she could have been, almost was, may be in a cavern in her own chest, still. 

Farther and farther they venture from Flamesgrace, brighter and hotter the fire in her hands burns, burns away at pretense, tests her nerve when it’s too piercingly bright with a light only she can see to sleep—Ophilia knows, with the certainty of the child who traced her letters C-L-E-M-E-N-T on her bedsheets every night, with the certainty of the girl who never did penance for stealing from the larder and hiding the food in her pillow for months after the church took her in.  She is not a saint, and never will be.  Whatever the fire leaves behind will be more _Ophilia_ than the reflection in the mirror, with exhilarating, ecstatic certainty.  The past that the present so patiently gentled away will be reforged, refolded, reborn, and she wants not to be bathed or baptized but to claw the ashes from her own eyes and see what colors she sees.

\--------

When a door falls shut on Cyrus, he finds a way around.

When fellow students stole his notes, he recreated them from textbooks.  When the archives were sealed to him, he scoured papers for the smallest secret mentions.  When the castle first turned him away at the gate in favor of a more established scholar, he went to the village children to hone their minds instead, until the position became available once more. 

There’s no key, no battering ram, no set of picks quite like simple knowledge and a curious mind.

But his solutions favor simplistic elegance—the answers academics always overlook.  Being well aware of his own limitations, he knows he has precious little time to catch a hint of where to begin his search for the book before frustration sets in and clouds his judgment—but then a remedy presents itself, in the form of newfound friends.

Things have come easily to Cyrus in his life.  He opened a book, and academic success arrived.  He wrote an application, and a job became his.  A few rejections mar his perfect record, but the scale remains obscenely out of balance.  The same cannot be said of the starved-wolf thief, of the thick-armed soldier, of the sharp-eyed dancer.  It’s a mercenary solution, but an effective one. Presented with new problems to whet his mind and give him an excuse to travel rather than wander aimlessly, Cyrus stays sharp while still working towards his own ends.

When a door falls open to allow him, Cyrus does not hesitate to walk through.

\--------

Tressa set one foot outside her little town and seabirds came to pluck out her eyes. 

Huge ships flowed in and out of the harbor every day, and from the time she was knee-high to a butterfly she would cling to the porch railing and imagine them whisking her away with them.  The other Rippletide children challenged each other into the surf to see who could swim the farthest towards the horizon, and despite her short arms, despite her skinny legs, no one could defeat Tressa with the smallest lungs, who never stopped striving.

Maybe the world tried to warn her she was going the wrong way. 

Of course, everywhere has a horizon.  It’s a fact of physics, of vision, of light.  But there’s nowhere where the line runs clean but the sea, lacking mountains, lacking forests, lacking thatched and slated roofs, and there’s fear in that, the loss of the line dividing land and sky.  When every day she set her sights on getting just a little closer before her strength failed and she had to let the tide carry her back in.

The little journal thuds against her breast as she aims and releases, felling the birds with rapid shots, spraying salt across her cheeks.  She wipes the blood from her eyes with a white sleeve and doesn’t stumble on the road to Cobbleston.  Even with the ocean and home behind her, each beat of her heart will remind her of her dream.

\--------

These are not your men.  These are not your soldiers.  After fifteen years, Olberic shouldn’t have to work so hard to remind himself.

Still, a harsh reproach bites at his tongue when Cyrus clubs a man from behind, when Ophilia uses light to blind, when Primrose sways her hips and slips a dagger between a man’s ribs.  _Honor lives on in this world,_ Erhardt once said with his chin digging into Olberic’s shoulder, with his heart fluttering beats so close, and apparently that’s still a dream alive somewhere within Olberic. 

There’s an _honorable_ way to do things, he tells Tressa as he re-strings her bow; you _dishonor_ yourself, he tells Therion as he shakes chunks of stolen onion into the night’s stew.  They’re just children.  They’re so _young._ Tressa, perilously close to the age of his scars.  What memory has she of war? 

It does her—does _them—_ no good to be coddled.  Olberic knows this.  They are not his men.  They are _not_ his soldiers, who might have been saved by a sheltering hand and an old man’s cautious mind. 

But he has to wake up and remind himself.  He has to remind himself as he lies awake at night.  He has to speak the words silent and aloud, as a mantra, as a motto, until it drowns out a different man’s words.

\--------

For the first time in a decade, there’s nothing to fear from the night.

The Sunlands, in her first impression of them, were hotter than the heart of a flame, and as she grew in that hostile place the sand scorched her skin to the bone.  She became her frame, rattling, dead.  The life in the snapping fire, the beating heart of the campsite, is nothing more than a nostalgic dream.

Always the same dream.

Primrose draws the edge of the dark cloak around herself.  It’s her turn on watch, but Olberic shifts restlessly, leaning still against a tree a few meters to her left, making so much noise that no one could ever hope to hear an ambush approaching.  Primrose’s only consolation is the occasional glimpse of white fur and luminous eyes through the trees as Linde keeps a watch all her own.

There’s _nothing_ quiet about the Coastlands night.  The sea is everywhere.  The crashing surf drowns out her own thoughts.  What she wouldn’t have given for that privilege, once—on desert nights so quiet no one even dared to cry out for fear of being heard by the wrong ears.  And what she wouldn’t have given for true companions—women who would share their food, men who would bind the wounds of others. 

It’s a difficult adjustment.  It’s probably too late, for her, for trust, for anything to put meat on her bones.

She’ll stay up through the safe night, under distant, bright stars, just to make sure.

\--------

As a small town apothecary, Alfyn sees an even broader range of clients than any Atlasdam bigwig.  Not in numbers, no, but in _diversity._ Half his job is adjusting dosages for hens and dogs and pigs, else people wind up waiting for days with dying animals on their hands for the real doctor to make her way through.  Zeph may be a more natural hand at medicine than Alfyn, but Alfyn’s easygoing attitude lends him a way with animals that his partner doesn’t quite possess.

Alfyn knows an injured animal when he sees one.  He’s splinted birds’ wings and hand-fed them until they regain the strength to hop and then to fly.  He’s coaxed a fox from its den, cleaned and stitched its leg from where it was caught in a trap, even as its teeth tore into his exposed hand.  He’s lain all night beside a mare the first night after a difficult birthing, listening to the new foal’s weak lungs, just in case he’d be needed.

He holds his tongue when the hunter and the thief blow into town.  They bring with them the smell of trouble; old man Gers can’t stop mumbling it under his breath.  But they also bring muscle; a world-weary readiness to throw themselves into a cause, for the right price.  Alfyn will work out their payment later, once Nina’s back on her feet. 

He starts by not butting in where he’s not wanted, even though he _knows_ an injured animal when he sees one.  H’aanit knows even better than himself, and part of him keeps hoping she’ll say something instead.  The thief, thin-fingered and rangy, never shows his back to anyone, the dancer, with her unwavering slitted eyes, snaps whenever someone gets too near. 

And it hurts, and he should _say_ something, because he _knows_ a wounded animal when he sees one, and he’s helped a thousand times before.

But if there’s one thing he’s learned from all these new sunrises he’s been chasing, it’s that _helping_ is never quite as easy as it was in a little boy’s dreams.

\--------

Are you watching, Darius?  Can you see me now?  The fire shudders under the Frostlands wind, and across it Cyrus leads a giggling Tressa in the beginnings of a waltz.  Therion’s left hand finds his right and twists and twists and twists.

_Don’t be so gloomy, biscuit!_

It chafes that that voice is still so clear in his brain, like sandpaper.  Like manacles.  It burns in its clear, high definition, never older than the twelve they were that summer that smelled of iron bars and apple blossoms.  He has nothing to compare it to and couldn’t stand to shape it in mirror to his own raspy, flat voice.  Therion could have passed the man Darius became a thousand times in a thousand markets and never been the wiser.

Therion, though—he hasn’t changed so much.  Darius would know him in a heartbeat, so he must be dead, else he would have returned to Therion by now.

Or maybe he’s changed more than he knows.  Or maybe Darius is staying away on purpose.

It’s easy on days like when Olberic just leans on his sword and watches Therion glide from form to form in the early morning, nodding approvingly even though Therion never fucking asked for his opinion.  It’s easy doing little sleight of hand tricks for Tressa to make the hours on the road go faster, like he’s some sort of magician begging for coins in the marketplace, before she remembers to nag him about his crimes.  And then it’s not easy, it’s not easy all at once, when she hooks a skinny arm to his skinny arm, when Alfyn hugs him hard enough to lift him off his feet, when H’aanit takes a watch to let him get a little more sleep even though he _never fucking asked her to do that—_

It’s the hardest thing in the world.  He’s racking up debt faster than a gambling addict.  He adds to his ledger by the day, by the hour as they give and they give to him—as he _takes_ and he _takes_ in a million little ways and even if he loses this stupid bracelet that jangles with every step and when he shifts in his pallet at night he’s already in so fucking deep that he’ll never be free ever again.

\--------

Cities are vaster than H’annit would have predicted, had she ever spared a thought for them, and quests involve much more standing still.  She taps the soles of her boots restlessly against the cobblestones in Atlasdam, against the hard-packed snow of Flamesgrace, and Linde licks road dust from her coat. 

S’warkii was a slow place, where people talked slowly, where children grew slowly, divided from the fastness of the world.  H’annit holds her tongue more often than not.  The words her mother taught her sound thick and clumsy among the chattering of her new companions, who may think her rude, but the world just has so much to _say._  H’annit, used to listening, finds herself in constant danger of interrupting.

There’s a secret she’ll tell no one, ever, not even Linde: sometimes she thinks that her master went “missing” just to teach her one final lesson.  It’s a thought she’s sure she’ll regret someday, be it soon or far in the future, when she reaches the ends of the earth and Z’aanta remains afield.  That he hid himself away just to crack the shadow of S’warkii open and leave her blinking and blinded in the face of so much world. 

A test that _must_ be her final one, because what else could possibly await?

**Author's Note:**

> octopath traveler comes out tomorrow and im so excited!!!! come talk to me about octopath at haloud.tumblr.com


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